2018-10-03 An extra publication: Beadwork jewelry!

NEW PUBLICATIONS

Go to http://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org to see the new publications.

A single publication has been added, more or less by accident. After publishing earlier this week, I noticed that the fundraising banner did not point to the page for this year. Of course that’s easy to correct – re-upload. But in the meantime this publication was already slated for the next round – and as I updated the site, this publication joined its fellows.

It’s a single sheet, and contains the design of a jewelry set, of two bracelets (identical), earrings, two brooches, a belt buckle, a necklace and an ornament that I don’t recognize – maybe a hair ornament? The original was quite creased, but editing took care of most of the imperfections. The sheet was donated by Arnout Bosch, one of the antiquarian booksellers on the weekly bookmarket in Amsterdam. It was folded into a book, and he thought it’d be nice for the Library – certainly! Thank you, Arnout! The original has been handed to the Rijksmuseum Research Library.

There’s no date on it, but it looks nineteenth century. I do think the beads probably were strung on metal wire, otherwise these pieces would not keep their shape.

FUNDRAISING

The new fundraising campaign has started as of now.

So far we have received USD 1334 in donations!

We’ve set an aim of USD 4000. If you can afford to donate a little bit, or a little bit more, please do so! We need to upgrade our site and make a mobile-friendly version, we have still lots of Workbaskets to scan and edit, and every week more patterns arrive.  Right now there’s a stack of 25 unopened boxes downstairs, 4 boxes that have still to be scanned in the living room, and stacks of books everywhere. We have volunteers helping with scanning, which of course has to be done locally, because the magazines are here. But it’s not enough. We will have to hire editing help, if we want to publish them at a decent speed.

I pay from my own purse whatever we need, while I can afford it. But I can’t keep this project afloat with only that. Fortunately our administrative help such as bookkeepers, accountants, and lawyers for the charity registrations are paid for this year and next, by the help and large donations of several donors. But if we want to keep everything free and accessible, we need your help.

Donate now to support the Antique Pattern Library project to pay for such things as database and website development, web hosting costs, data entry, scanning equipment, and help us meet the public funding ratio, which allows us to keep our nonprofit status, making your donations tax-deductible, depending on where you live and on the local tax laws and tax treaties.

Scan donations count too! They save us room (for the books) money (for the shipping price and customs duties), and time (for scanning).

And if you are an Amazon customer, you can also support us via Amazon Smile. If you click on the Amazon link before you start shopping, Amazon will set aside a little bit from their profit on what you spend and give that to us.

Donate via Paypal:


 

The limit of small donations is yet to be determined, we will start at USD 500. It increases if we get more small donations. That’s the limit to what you can donate per year and still have it count towards the small donations. It’s recalculated every year. If you donate more, the IRS puts your donations on the other side of the public funding ratio. So, if you were planning to donate just above the limit, give some to another organization, buy a cup of coffee and donate just the limit amount.

On the other hand, we are looking for people who can afford a one-time larger donation to support our goals for the coming year, which will cost us some money.It will help speed up our publication rate, and make more time available for the actual library work, which is sadly suffering, because we as Board members have to spend more time than we like on bookkeeping and IRS compliance and stuff like that. Necessary, but it cuts into the time we have for the Library. Your donations will help us hire help for the elementary tasks and for editing.

If you can’t afford to give anything, which also happens in these difficult times, introducing the Library to people who don’t know of it yet, is very useful, since it broadens our user base and therefore also our donor base.

Anything you donate for the Library, goes to the Library. If you don’t mind it going to cover our overhead, mark your donation to NMA General. To give you an idea of what your donation would do: USD 10 pays for our hosting costs for a month (at the moment) or an hour of administrative assistance. USD 50 allows us to take one of our RESERVE publications and release it for publication. USD 100 pays for 1TB backup for the scans and edited files. (Currently we have 5 TB data.) Larger donations in the past have paid for fast A3 scanners, website help, and hours of editing, as well as a start with putting our Library records online in a way that they will show up in professional library searches.

Thank you all, and enjoy the new and old treasures!

 

Posted in New Publications and tagged , , , , , , .

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.